While it delivers some hard-hitting action, this thriller is more successful as a melodrama.
This 1990s-set sequel follows Manhattan teachers who become entangled with a menacing figure: the son of a Peruvian terrorist leader.
Lily Napolitano is a fourth-degree judo black belt and her sensei’s star pupil. But even with her prowess, she can’t fend off multiple assailants one late evening and flees to safety in the midst of gunfire. Because she can’t identify anyone for authorities to make an arrest, Lily settles back into teaching at P.S. 20, a Lower East Side school. The school receives new teachers Luke Natani and Mario DeMaio as well as a new principal, Dr. Seymour Lomsky, who quickly promotes Lily to a job as his assistant. Meanwhile, Paco Ñahui, who spearheaded the attack against Lily, is a criminal establishing a crew in New York. He seems determined to win the approval of his father, who leads a terrorist organization in Peru. As Lomsky’s increasing gambling debts ultimately connect him to the culprit, it’s only a matter of time before Paco finds the woman who escaped the assault. But when Lily proves a formidable and, if necessary, lethal opponent, Paco’s ensuing retribution involves people close to Lily, including her husband, Bobby, and fellow teachers. The early scene of Lily’s attack aptly establishes the protagonist as physically capable and Paco as a vicious baddie. But Rose’s (Lily’s Payback, 2012) urban thriller offers predominantly character development and melodrama. For example, Paco’s crew takes out a rival gang while he recalls—or dreams of—recurrent childhood beatings at his father’s hands. The captivating characters at P.S. 20 include Luke, a Navajo who has a romantic interest in teacher Mimi Purnell and a shocking family secret, and Mario, a former boxer. But when Paco isn’t actively looking for Lily, the pages are free of tension and suspense. It’s only much later, when Lily and her pals band together to try to thwart Paco, that the action picks up, though the inevitable finale is anticlimactic. Rose’s rather plain prose surprisingly tones down the short but periodic sex scenes and instances of violence.
While it delivers some hard-hitting action, this thriller is more successful as a melodrama.Pub Date: Aug. 4, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-5439-6585-8
Page Count: 342
Publisher: BookBaby
Review Posted Online: Dec. 2, 2019
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
APPRECIATIONS
Genetically engineered dinosaurs run amok in Crichton's new, vastly entertaining science thriller. From the introduction alone—a classically Crichton-clear discussion of the implications of biotechnological research—it's evident that the Harvard M.D. has bounced back from the science-fantasy silliness of Sphere (1987) for another taut reworking of the Frankenstein theme, as in The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man. Here, Dr. Frankenstein is aging billionaire John Hammond, whose monster is a manmade ecosystem based on a Costa Rican island. Designed as the world's ultimate theme park, the ecosystem boasts climate and flora of the Jurassic Age and—most spectacularly—15 varieties of dinosaurs, created by elaborate genetic engineering that Crichton explains in fascinating detail, rich with dino-lore and complete with graphics. Into the park, for a safety check before its opening, comes the novel's band of characters—who, though well drawn, double as symbolic types in this unsubtle morality play. Among them are hero Alan Grant, noble paleontologist; Hammond, venal and obsessed; amoral dino-designer Henry Wu; Hammond's two innocent grandchildren; and mathematician Ian Malcolm, who in long diatribes serves as Crichton's mouthpiece to lament the folly of science. Upon arrival, the visitors tour the park; meanwhile, an industrial spy steals some dino embryos by shutting down the island's power—and its security grid, allowing the beasts to run loose. The bulk of the remaining narrative consists of dinos—ferocious T. Rex's, voracious velociraptors, venom-spitting dilophosaurs—stalking, ripping, and eating the cast in fast, furious, and suspenseful set-pieces as the ecosystem spins apart. And can Grant prevent the dinos from escaping to the mainland to create unchecked havoc? Though intrusive, the moralizing rarely slows this tornado-paced tale, a slick package of info-thrills that's Crichton's most clever since Congo (1980)—and easily the most exciting dinosaur novel ever written. A sure-fire best-seller.
Pub Date: Nov. 7, 1990
ISBN: 0394588169
Page Count: 424
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: Sept. 21, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1990
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